“You’ll just have to do something about it” : re-reading female desire, sexuality and agency in contemporary Atlantic Canadian literature

Abstract

This study seeks to examine representations of female sexuality in contemporary Atlantic Canadian literature from 1995 – 2015. Although it could be argued that a new wave of female writers have come to dominate the fictional landscape of the region, there has been no sustained analysis of female sexuality in the region's literature. This study positions itself in the middle of this absence and attempts to bridge the gap by offering a re-reading of Lisa Moore’s early short fiction, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven, and George Elliott Clarke’s The Motorcyclist. Representations of embodied female experiences will be foregrounded in this analysis in order to come to a better understanding of the complexities of female sexuality and desire. Each chapter will look at a different aspect of female sexual experiences in order to give women a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between body and self.